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Glossary

The Four (or Seven) Archangels

The Archangels

We owe the named archangels — most of them — to 1 Enoch.

Genesis has angels. Exodus has the "angel of the LORD." Isaiah has seraphim, Ezekiel has cherubim and ophanim (wheels). But the Hebrew Bible names exactly two angels by personal name: Michael (in Daniel 10:13, 21, and 12:1) and Gabriel (in Daniel 8:16 and 9:21). And those two appear only in Daniel, the latest book in the Hebrew Bible canon, written during the same religious-historical moment as 1 Enoch was being compiled.

The fuller list — Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Sariel/Saraqael, Remiel, Raguel — comes from 1 Enoch 20. Western iconography, Orthodox liturgical commemoration, the Latin angelological tradition: all of it draws on a roster that the Hebrew Bible never gave them.

The four (the Watchers' judgment scene)

In the original layer of 1 Enoch (the Book of the Watchers, chs 1–36), four archangels are introduced together in chapter 9 as the heavens' first responders to humanity's cry. They look down from heaven, see the blood being shed by the giants, and bring the petition to God:

Name Hebrew root meaning What he does in 1 En 10
Michael "Who is like God?" Sent against Semjâzâ. Binds him for seventy generations underground; later announces eschatological renewal.
Gabriel "God is my strength" Sent against the giants. Commanded to "destroy the children of the Watchers from among men" by setting them against each other in mutual slaughter.
Raphael "God heals" Sent against Azazel. Binds him hand and foot, casts him into Dûdâêl, covers his face with stones. Then "heal the earth" — the second meaning of his name.
Uriel "God is my light" Sent to Noah. Warns of the coming flood and tells Noah how to escape. Later, in the Astronomical Book (1 En 72–82), Uriel guides Enoch through the courses of the heavens — the archangel of celestial knowledge.

Each archangel's name maps to his assigned task. This is a literary feature of 1 Enoch: characters whose names describe what they do, and whose names are remembered because of what they did.

The seven (1 Enoch 20)

A slightly later layer of 1 Enoch gives a longer list:

"And these are the names of the holy angels who watch: Uriel, one of the holy angels, who is over the world and over Tartarus. Raphael, one of the holy angels, who is over the spirits of men. Raguel, one of the holy angels who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries. Michael, one of the holy angels, to wit, he that is set over the best part of mankind and over chaos. Saraqael, one of the holy angels, who is set over the spirits, who sin in the spirit. Gabriel, one of the holy angels, who is over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim. Remiel, one of the holy angels, whom God set over those who rise." — 1 En 20:1–8, Charles 1917

This is the list. The seven who later become a fixture in Christian and Islamic and esoteric Jewish angelology.

Saraqael is the same figure as Sariel elsewhere — and Sariel is the name preserved on the Aramaic Qumran fragments. He appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible. He owes his existence in religious imagination to this paragraph.

Remiel (also Jeremiel; cf. 2 Esdras 4:36) is the angel "over those who rise" — that is, the angel of the resurrection. His role passes into 2 Esdras and from there into Western Christian eschatology.

The trail into Christianity

The four named in 1 En 9 are exactly the four named in the later Book of Tobit (Raphael as Tobias's traveling companion, 5:4–6, 12:15), in early Christian apocalypses, and in the patristic angelological tradition.

The seven persist most strongly in the Eastern Orthodox synaxis of the holy archangels (commemorated 8 November in the Byzantine calendar), where seven are venerated. The Western Latin tradition, after Pope Zachary (745 CE) discouraged the cult of angels beyond Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, settled on three — those three being precisely the three the Hebrew Bible eventually names, which are also three of the four in the Watchers' judgment scene.

The chain runs: 1 Enoch 9, 20 → Tobit (deuterocanonical, ~2nd c. BCE) → Christian patristic angelology → modern Western iconography. The angels everyone knows are the angels 1 Enoch first set down on a list.

In the New Testament

  • Michael disputes with the devil over the body of Moses in Jude 9 — a story that is otherwise lost but is alluded to as if the reader knows it. (Origen says the source was the Assumption of Moses, another Second-Temple text.) In Revelation 12:7 Michael leads the angelic army against the dragon.
  • Gabriel announces the births of John the Baptist and Jesus (Luke 1:11–20, 26–38) — the angel of revelation, performing the role 1 Enoch had assigned him as messenger of the divine plan.
  • Raphael has no New Testament appearance — he was retained from Tobit but the canonical narrative didn't have a slot for him.
  • Uriel likewise drops out of the New Testament canon but persists strongly in 2 Esdras and in later Eastern Orthodox tradition.

What it tells you

Western Christianity got most of its named angelology from a book most Western Christians have never read. The Day-of-Atonement scapegoat is named for Azazel; the angel who comes to Mary in Luke 1 is named for the same tradition that named the angel who appeared to Daniel. The Hebrew Bible left the heavens almost unpopulated. 1 Enoch filled them in, and the names stuck.

Cross-references

Scholarship pointers

  • D. Olyan, A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Mohr Siebeck, 1993) — the standard study of how angelic names entered Israelite religion.
  • K. Sullivan, Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship Between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament (Brill, 2004).
  • G. W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia, 2001), ad loc. on chs 9, 10, 20.
  • C. Newman, J. Davila & G. Lewis, eds., The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Brill, 1999) — for the angelic mediator tradition's relationship to early Christology.
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